Samstag, 15. Mai 2010

The reason for this is not because nothing happened since then (quite the contrary) but rather that we are waiting for the next patch level Qt release.

For 0.3 alpha 2 we finally switched from portaudio to QtMultimedia which fixed some long standing issues on Ubuntu. However, it also introduced a few new issues because Qt 4.6.2 still has some nasty bugs in this area.

Luckily, the Qt software team is incredibly responsive and the most important bugs have already been fixed in their current development version.

With simon 0.3 we introduce the scenario system: A package based recognition architecture allows users to simply choose which use cases they want the speech recognition to handle from a vast online repository.

That's the idea. The problematic part is that "vast online repository". We obviously can't anticipate all use cases of simon, nor do we have the necessary manpower to design all of those scenarios. But what we can do - and what we already did - was to make it very easy to create and share scenarios from within simon.

Now we depend on the community to pick up the concept and start creating / uploading scenarios.

This is why I was excited to see the first user contributed scenario uploaded to kde-files.org: The day before yesterday, Ken Maclean (of Voxforge fame) created and uploaded a scenario to control the music player rythmbox.

Considering a stable version of simon hasn't even been released yet I am looking forward to many more user contributed scenarios being uploaded soon!

Want to get involved? Contact us at support ate simon-listens dot org to find out more!